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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
On Goodness

On Goodness

Wolfsdorf, David Conan

Hardcover

PhilosophyLinguistics

ISBN10: 0190688505
ISBN13: 9780190688509
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Sep 2 2019
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
On Goodness attempts to answer the question What is goodness? It is natural to associate this question with ethics; but goodness is not confined to ethics. Water and wine, a strategy for streamlining maintenance operations, and an oil painting may all be good and in non-ethical ways. Goodness figures prominently in ethics; so the study serves ethics. But it serves other domains as well.

On Goodness is a contribution to the foundations of value theory. It is also a metaphysical inquiry, for two reasons. As the examples indicate, the entity under investigation is extremely general. Goodness occurs in potables, plans, and paintings, among countless other kinds of things. Second, it is particularly obscure what sort of being the entity is. Besides the description good, is there a single thing that good drinks, strategies, and artworks share? Is their goodness related in a more complex way? And regardless of these relations, in any instance, just what is that goodness?

The question What is goodness? has been central to philosophy since Socrates and Plato made it their polestar. The distinctive contribution of On Goodness lies in its methodology. The method of pursuing the metaphysical question is linguistic. The basic proposal is that achieving the answer depends on clarifying the meaning and use of the words good and goodness. Consequently, the study is pervasively informed by and critically engaged with contemporary linguistic theories and ideas.

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